Citegeist

Visualizing my twitterverse

// January 16th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // Conferences, Web Stuff

So it all started yesterday while I was playing with CoverItLive…

The projected chatroom at the Top Technology Trends session during the ALA 2008 Annual Conference was met with mixed emotion–some people (including me) thought it was pretty neat; others found it distracting and thought it took something away from the session. The reason that I thought it was pretty neat is that those without laptops could see what we who had laptops might be up to–they could peek into our world and maybe get curious enough to want to check it out later. Not so much.

Anyway, I suppose there’s a reason it’s called a back channel, and I suppose that those in the room without laptops don’t particularly need or care to know what those in the room (and those not in the room) with laptops are saying in the chat room. Given the complaints, I’ve been trying to think of an engaging alternative–a projected equivalent to hold music, if you will, that the audience can gaze at while we get set up or whatever. The committee has talked about doing something with twitter (which also doesn’t make for a really good projected back channel, unless you’re willing to be upstaged by your audience), then I wondered: What if we could make use of TwitterVision 3D to illustrate appropriately-tagged tweets coming in from around the world? How hard could it be?

Alas, it turns out to be too hard for me. I am pretty effective when it comes to the beat-things-with-rocks approach, but (I’ve concluded that) this requires real programming that is just not within my reach at the moment. The best I could do, after a couple of hours of scouting around for Google Maps and Twitter mashups (with a brief and bewildering pitstop at GeoTwitter), was a visualization of my own personal twitterverse, which I created by using a the Twitter Friends Yahoo Pipe GeoRSS feed output fed to FreshLogic’s Atlas:

(best viewed in original size. See also the North America Twitter Friends Map.)

Want one of your own? Take this URL, erase my twitter handle (cindi) from the end of it and add your own. Anna has already done one.

I also just ran across this Wired post. Hey, another rock to beat things with! I just hope the thing I’m beating doesn’t turn out to be the infamous expired equine.

UPDATE: Shawn at FreshLogic has created a form to visualize your twitterverse.  It’s on his blog.

The Big Map on Campus

// November 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Web Stuff

I recently began parking in an area of campus that is new to me, and that has had me thinking about maps.  Am I taking the most efficient route from my car to the library?  Am I taking the most efficient route to my favorite parking lot?  How do I get to *those* employee spots? Really, what time of day are those *ever* empty??

Glen Horton’s recent presentation on integrating web 2.0 tools into a library website also has me thinking.  We’ve sort of haphazardly gone about trying new things at MPOW (my place of work), and we’ve mostly been successful.  I think it might be time, though, to move beyond experimenting and take a more systematic look at the tools that are out there and make sure we’re using them in the most efficient way.

These two thoughts have come together in my head to form this week’s mashup:  the EKU Campus Map using Google Maps.  It’s publicly editable.  Give it a go:

View Larger Map

(the one thing I can’t figure out or that it doesn’t have is the ability to rearrange the order of the placemarks as they appear in the list on the left. Maybe I’m just being too librariany again.)

NB: it’s way incomplete, but many hands make light work, yes?

Thoughts?

Another wordle – U2 lyrics

// June 26th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // U2, Web Stuff

My friend John McDonald suggested a U2 Wordle. Here it is (and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it…):

Fun with Wordle

// June 23rd, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Web Stuff

Jason Griffey posted a tag cloud of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon that he created with the fascinating Java-based Wordle. The number of applications allowing us to analyze and visualize data is growing, from the sliders at Kayak that allow for easy changes to a search for travel information to the wickedly useful timesuck that is Swivel. Here are two of my own Wordle creations:

Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” represented as a tag cloud

tag cloud of Shakespeare’s Sonnets